Remy, dressed and disconcertingly alert, roused Feilan in the dark, too early. Feilan, full of hazed pleasure, pulled him down into bed for a long kiss. Then he woke up enough to remember what he was dreading.
‘He’s alive,’ Remy told him immediately, propped against his chest where Feilan had dragged him. ‘Sleeping. Micah, too, now Noura’s keeping watch.’
Feilan pressed his forehead against Remy’s. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. You’re the one who has to wake him up and get him on his feet.’
‘Take the thanks. I said I wouldn’t make you cope with blood again, and then I did, and you did so well. I didn’t exactly show my gratitude for that last night.’
Remy bit back a smile. ‘Ah, I think you rather did, eventually.’
Planting a kiss to the corner of that tiny, pleased smile, Feilan murmured, ‘Enjoy it?’
‘Very much so.’ He declined further kisses, however, wriggling off Feilan to let him up. He was moving well, no sign of pain in his back and shoulders. ‘And I can’t claim to enjoy wading through blood, but if there’s one thing the last few nights have proven, it’s that Margalita and Geroald weren’t my fault.’ He swallowed. Carefully, eyes lowered, he said, ‘No matter what some people might like to imply, if they could have been saved, I would have saved them.’
Feilan would have liked to jump on this admission to make Remy renounce his uncle entirely, but he wasn’t a complete jolterhead, and wrapped his arms around him instead. He heard him catch his breath.
‘It’s quite healing, actually, to know that,’ Remy said, notwithstanding that he sounded like he was trying not to cry. He pulled free, wiping at his eyes. ‘I’ll fetch some clean clothes for Torben.’
Noura was sitting at the mouth of the cave, looking out at the shadowy view in the indistinct gloam before dawn. Feilan thanked her, too, and was glad to receive only one of her brusque shrugs rather than a sudden emotional intimacy he wasn’t entirely capable of appreciating. She wanted her pair of tattoos and keeping Torben alive was key, regardless of any feelings around violent bloody death she might have accumulated.
Torben was asleep on his back in the nest of blankets. He didn’t look like he’d moved at all, and Feilan felt a chill, a hobgoblin cavorting among the dry bones of his gravemound. He shook it off. He had lagged behind events badly last night; he couldn’t let himself fall victim to his shock and fear again today.
The exhausted Micah had collapsed on a scrap of blanket next to Torben, curled like a cat into Torben’s uninjured side. Feilan nudged Micah’s shoulder with one foot and then leapt backwards. You never knew, not with warriors, and not with assassins, or whatever Micah was. The lithe eunuch came up fast, but not aggressively, though he did distinctly relax when he saw it was just Feilan.
‘Dawn’s coming.’ Feilan stepped past him, and pressed the toe of his boot into Torben’s ribs, announcing himself with steady pressure instead of a kick. ‘Wake up, Thunder Bear.’
Torben didn’t stir for just long enough that Feilan had to push away that chill again, but then his bright blue eyes blinked open. He stared up at Feilan.
‘Did I tell you where my hoards are buried?’ he asked eventually, voice rasping.
‘No, and you’re not going to.’
‘Berguthi’s balls, I’m not going to,’ Torben agreed. ‘Those are mine.’
Feilan made the sudden weakness in his knees look like a deliberate choice to kneel. He bent to kiss Torben’s forehead, and clasped his hand, palm to palm, thumb to thumb. He knew the message this would send Remy, and the others, and for the moment he didn’t care – Torben believed he’d missed finding his death, and that was tantamount to making it true.
Torben made a grizzle of complaint, but didn’t untangle himself. He used his free hand to push blankets aside, and eyed off the bandaging. His chest, his whole body, was roped with old scars: this injury, too, would become merely another scrawled line in the liturgy of the luck and skill of survival.
‘Do I want to look?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ Feilan said, finally letting go. ‘You were never very handsome, and this hasn’t improved things.’
It was standard warrior cant; Torben snorted. ‘Who did this? Skinny Shanks and Foxy, I suppose?’
‘You could thank them.’
While Torben frowned in blank confusion, Remy approached and handed Feilan a clay cup. It was the drink he’d been giving him in the mornings, but Feilan could see extra colours in it, cool shades of blue and green whirling within the bright zings of lemon-yellow. He looked up at Remy questioningly.
‘This will get him moving,’ Remy said. ‘But it’s dangerous. Energy and pain relief, when he should be lying still. He needs to go straight to bed once he’s performed for my uncle.’
Torben accepted the drink from Feilan’s hand, and let Feilan and Micah slowly lever him into a sitting position, Micah resting one hand on the bandaging as if he could sense the state of the stitches at the movement. Torben was enough in command of himself to not audibly groan, but he did breathe out in a gust.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded as he alternated between sips and grimacing at the taste of the sips like a bratty child.
‘We have to get you on your feet,’ Feilan told him. ‘You and Micah are due to walk in off the hunting ground under the eye of Uncle Bertrand, or be disqualified.’
‘We are all going to carefully help him rise so he does not pull his stitches,’ Micah told them.
With Remy and Feilan on one side, and Noura and Micah on the other, they worked together to set Torben on his feet. He stood swaying. Grumbling deep in his chest, he tried to walk, and both Feilan and Micah had to catch him, taking his weight against a shoulder each. Noura and Remy worked around them to get a replacement shirt on him, unbloodied and unrent. Noura had rubbed it in the dirt first to make it plausibly stained.
‘We have to get him all the way across the hunting ground,’ Feilan said, tired by the very thought, and very much doubting Torben’s ability to walk up the last slope by himself.
Torben waved him off. ‘I’m fine.’
He shrugged off their support, and strolled towards the cave mouth. Feilan looked at that, and then looked at Remy. Between the salve that had healed Remy’s cut almost overnight and dramatically accelerated the healing of Noura’s – and now Torben’s? – wounds, and the salve that had taken away the damage to his own face and apparently Remy’s back almost as effectively, he began to suspect that Remy’s consistent denial of witchcraft was the one lie his husband was telling.
‘He’s not magically healed,’ Remy said to that look. ‘I did warn you. It won’t last, and he’s doing himself more damage while it does.’
‘I will contain him.’ Micah hurried after Torben. Feilan heard him say, ‘Do you understand the plan? We walk in off the field as if we spent the night as lovers. You have my permission to be smug.’
Torben grunted in acknowledgement, then added something that Feilan couldn’t quite hear but did not have to. This was followed by another grunt, this one of well-deserved pain.
In a bid to keep their usual routine so as not to rouse the attention of their spies, Feilan had to stay with Remy in the witch-cave as visitors began to arrive for the daily consultations. Noura would meet Torben as Micah walked him back to his room.
Remy gave her a flask of some liquid he said would counteract both the energising drink and the blood loss. ‘You’ll probably have to make him drink it.’
Noura gave one of her unflappable shrugs and marched away.
Hours later, Feilan knocked on Torben’s door. Micah answered, bodily blocking the ajar space. When he saw it was Feilan, he allowed the door to open a little more, lounging against the door frame. He looked tired, but he’d washed and discarded his bloodied clothing.
He was now shirtless, and wearing thin gold chains dangling from both nipples and looped about his shapely biceps. His navel was pierced with gold, too. The effect of the gold against his dark, smooth skin was striking. Gauzy trousers hung low on his hips, the fine weave clinging to the muscles of his thighs and calves.
‘Ah…’
‘If you are done with your ogling,’ Micah said icily, ‘I will report he is safely abed and sleeping well.’
Feilan managed to tear his gaze away and peek past. Torben was out cold on his back atop the linens, swathed in fresh bandaging that told Feilan he’d probably bled after his exertions. But his colour was good, the movement of his chest steady.
He wanted to touch him, to feel his breathing, to check for fever. ‘I can watch over him for a time.’
‘You understand the ploy you have committed us both to? Your friend cannot be confined to bed due to severe injury. He is instead merely closeted with his new lover, who is enthralling.’
Micah waved at himself, his bare chest, the sheer and clinging trousers, the gold links decorating his lickable skin. Feilan followed the motion, and couldn’t disagree.
‘So enthralling he won’t let him out of his bed. His new lover is also very jealous, and is as a guard dog at the door to the lovers’ chamber to chase off rivals. I shall have to keep up your ridiculous pretence until we put about a better story to explain his further confinement.’
His tone was delicately aggrieved. Feilan opened his mouth to point out that Micah had come up with this particular ploy, not him. He watched the eunuch tug a blanket over Torben’s sleeping form, and suddenly realised how slow he was being.
Micah had risked getting himself disqualified for the sake of saving a member of an alliance he hadn’t yet agreed to join. That had to mean he’d known, the moment he’d seen the monster, he’d never take it alone. All Feilan had to do now was come through on the plan to save Afzal. That was simultaneously reassuring and concerning.
He said, ‘Thank you.’
‘I suggest you thank your husband,’ Micah said. ‘This man should be dying, if not dead, and we all know it.’
Feilan nodded blindly, guiltily. He’d thanked Remy by throwing him into the wall.
He heard a step down the hallway, and turned to see Adeline, fidgeting with a fold of her kirtle, expression sombre. She was early, if here for the usual afternoon visit with her uncle. Micah shook his head warningly and closed the door.
‘Heilsa, Lina,’ Feilan said. ‘Remy’s still out on his village rounds.’
‘I’m here to see Torben,’ she said. ‘He didn’t come to First Hill today. And…’ She hesitated. ‘He came in very late? Is he…’
Feilan debated with himself. Adeline plainly suspected something had happened the night before, beyond the scraps she’d been allowed to know. It didn’t mean Bertrand or Darya would be equally suspicious, since they’d been fed the story about Micah’s irresistible charms, and half-naked Micah had likely answered several knocks before Feilan’s own, to keep the tale hot for retelling. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be suspicious, and it’d be easier if Adeline was not in a position to give anything away.
Worse, telling the truth would risk the idealistic, upright queen deciding she would not be a party to cheating, even if it cost her an independent throne.
But Remy didn’t lie to his niece. Feilan would have to risk the truth.
He walked with Adeline to the foyer and waited until she’d thanked and dismissed the attendant laying out trays of seedcakes and herbal tea. Once they were alone in the very centre of the open space, he quietly said, ‘He’s hurt. He’s alive, but he’s hurt. Best not to tell anyone.’
Adeline was silent. She took a long sip of her tea. Her cup was one of the heavy-bottomed pottery mugs common locally, thickly cast and naturally glazed by salts and minerals when the clay was kiln-fired. The Nivardus royal line hadn’t yet succumbed to the passion for the delicate, beautiful, expensive Ystheran ceramics.
‘He did walk in unaided,’ he added, overlooking the fact that his entire alliance had secretly departed the arena to make that happen, indisputably violating the rules.
‘I felt sorry for the monster,’ Adeline said. ‘It was killing our sheep, so my father and Uncle Hugo set out to hunt it, and I felt sorry for it, because it’s not its fault it needs to eat. And it killed him, and that was never worth the sheep we might have saved.’
Before Feilan could muster a response, she set her cup down with a firm click. ‘And it’s hurt Torben. And it’s killed most of the other champions. And I am so angry at it.’ Her dark eyes grew wet. ‘I hate it, and I hate this contest, and those men are dying on my behalf, they’re dying for me, and is that worth the crown?’
Feilan said, ‘They’re dying for coin, the same way mercenaries have died for hundreds of years.’
What else were battle-bold men good for, except battle? But the blunt correction did not seem to assuage Adeline’s guilt. She wiped at her eyes, mouth downturned, and picked at a crack in the glaze of her mug, avoiding his gaze.
Feilan started to pick up his own cup of tea, before sitting back abruptly. ‘Adeline, you didn’t set this contest. This contest didn’t have to happen at all. If Bertrand hadn’t—’
‘The monster needs dealing with,’ she said, head lowered. ‘It’ll just keep coming back, otherwise. We have more people living in its way these days, we can’t allow relics of a savage age to range freely in these modern times. It’s our responsibility.’
Her tone was one of dismal recitation: those were Great-Uncle Bertrand’s words, and of course, they were true words, because the family patriarch was so very good at slithering his manipulations in under the shelter of truth. Something did have to be done. All those stories Feilan had collected about the monster from the townsfolk, and especially the villagers, hadn’t just given him clues as to its habits and territory. Couched in the usual folktale rubrics of just deserts, the stories told of men and women being cut down, children being taken, when they went out at night against injunction. That huge beast was a predator to its core and it did not differentiate animal flesh from human flesh. The Riverlands allies had probably agreed with alacrity to Bertrand’s suggestion, because they’d also be subject to the inevitable juxtaposition of overspilling populations and a timeworn hunting ground. The human hold on the resource-rich river valleys could no longer be paid for by irregular sacrifice to an ancient, solitary creature of talons and teeth.
It galled him to agree with a single thing Bertrand said.
‘It is your responsibility,’ he admitted, eventually. ‘Every ruler sends men to die for them, Adeline. Every good ruler weighs the cost of their crown. If the weight is too heavy for you, withdraw Torben and let your regent, and then the husband he gives you, take the burden from you.’
Adeline lifted her chin, face set in stern lines. He hadn’t meant to be harsh, but he was comforted to see that his blunt words had provoked Remy’s stubborn streak to rear up in his niece. ‘No. It’s my responsibility, Uncle Faro. I was raised to serve my people as best I could. That doesn’t mean being a squeamish baby about what must be done.’
She wrinkled her nose, suddenly more child than queen again; there was nothing, Feilan supposed, more annoying to a child than being thought a slightly younger child.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, you’re not wrong to regret deaths in your name. You’re not even wrong to feel sorry for the monster. Compassion is an undervalued part of making hard decisions.’ Even he, who had to fight ingrained Vaer conditioning to accept that kindness wasn’t weakness, knew that. ‘It just can’t be the only part.’
Adeline smiled and patted his hand. He might have said more, might have tried again to gently point out some of Bertrand’s games, but just then young Prince Afzal came in, carried in the arms of the large, blank-eyed man Feilan had seen with him before. Afzal, with or without his carrier’s help, had worked out a position which meant he was carried upright upon the man’s thick forearms, rather than cradled like a baby, but he still looked much happier once settled into a chair by Adeline, carefully pulling a woven blanket over his spindly legs.
She brightened considerably, greeting him with genuine fondness and offering him tea, cake and cushions in quick succession.
Feilan rose to leave. Afzal was, as usual, accompanied by Darya, and he instinctively wanted to avoid her, and her large guardsmen.
‘Oh, stay, do,’ Adeline said, catching his hand. ‘Uncle Remy will be here soon.’
Uncle Remy was arriving now, in fact, with Rosmunda and Conrad on his heels, looking so shyly pleased to see him with Adeline that Feilan had no recourse but to acquiesce.